Are we really a country on the brink of poverty?
Notes on the social question in Italy. Michael the Great's Notepad
Are we a country on the brink of poverty? This is what it would seem from certain narratives of the main parliamentary opposition parties (soundingly defeated – also for this? – in the recent administrative elections). Yet we are a country that ranks first in Europe for the possession of homes, cars, mobile phones. On the second for pets. A country where the turnover linked to gambling – legal and illegal – is close to the amount collected from income tax. A country that, in order to know the future as wizards and witches, spends more than what is set aside annually for pension funds. A country where there are more than eight million pensioners wholly or partially assisted by general taxation.
Finally, it is true that the number of people in absolute poverty has doubled in the last three decades. Without however forgetting that a large part of economic poverty derives from educational and social poverty from which almost ten million Italians suffer, many of whom are addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling or other food problems such as anorexia and bulimia. A harsh reality which should also include those who find themselves in situations of sudden difficulty following early separations or divorces. Although, therefore, the number of poor people is rising, we are not a poor country. However, we are a country that has stratospheric tax evasion and an underground economy, and which among those in the OECD area boasts the sad record (after Turkey) of the highest index of functional illiteracy, while it is at the bottom of the ranking for dynamics productivity and investment in research.
In the mid-seventies of the last century, the question of the middle class became central to the public debate after the publication, in 1974, of the famous "Essay on social classes" by Paolo Sylos Labini. The pupil of Joseph Schumpeter, questioning a mantra of the Marxist vulgate, showed the growing weight of the middle classes (in the plural), above all the petty bourgeoisie of the agricultural, handicraft and commercial sectors (the infamous "mice in the cheese" ). And, while recognizing its importance, he attributed it above all to the patronage policies implemented by the DC.
Today the question arises in different terms. Because the presumed decline of the middle class – of its status as well as its income levels – does not lend itself to easy journalistic simplifications. In fact, attention should be paid more to the widening of the gap between its upper and lower layers, or rather to the inequalities created by this gap. Trend first analyzed by Charles Wright Mills in his monumental research on "white collars" of 1951. In truth, a middle class never existed. Indeed, the middle class is a mixed salad of occupations, a nebula that includes self-employed workers (such as artisans, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs) and employees (such as public and private employees). When we want to refer to a whole that goes beyond and includes these diversities, then the term class comes into play, which indicates a proximity of cultural traits, lifestyles, consumption models, also the effect of political choices.
Now, looking at the data on intergenerational mobility in Italy, the scenario remains disheartening: being born into a middle-class family means having the certainty of remaining middle-class, while being born into a working-class family favors permanence in the lower social strata. Nonetheless, the facts invite us not to fall into the pitfall that places the relative impoverishment of the middle class in Third World scenarios. But they also invite us not to snub the risks of unprecedented and dramatic fractures in the world of work. The facts, for example, also tell us that the servile work carried out by immigrant women has allowed Italian women to emancipate themselves, at least partially, without however changing the traditional structure of the family and welfare. And they tell us that the less skilled manual trades are becoming increasingly ethnic, especially in the North. Thus a situation arises in which the lower rungs of the social ladder are segregated on an ethnic basis. Unfortunately, it is a problem that the xenophobic right interests nothing, the "inclusive" left little.
The notorious social issue, therefore, does not only concern the rate of inequality, those who have low wages, a precarious job and are excluded or stationed on the margins of the "city of work". It calls into question the overall structure of our welfare. In the early 1950s, Thomas Marshall could argue that a drive towards equality was implicit in the welfare state under construction. When tested, this prediction turned out to be a mistake. Just think of the inability, even in the most interventionist versions of the welfare state, to eradicate the harshest and most mortifying forms of poverty as the very macho roots of the apparatus of citizenship rights. In other words, the historical experience of welfare leads to the affirmation of a thesis exactly opposite to that of the English sociologist, which only academic left-wing moralists can ignore, namely that freedom and equality can enter into conflict with each other. Also because social protections depend, to an extent that has no comparison with civil and political rights, on the resources created by the market. Challenged by demographic, family and work changes, welfare systems have been on the grill of governments since it was no longer possible to pay them by raising taxes. They were financed by borrowing. And the debt, sooner or later, must be repaid.
Unfortunately, the domestic political class has appeared insensitive to this warning. “All the defects and perhaps all the virtues of the Italian custom are summed up in the institution of postponement: rethinking it, not compromising oneself, postponing the choice; keep your feet in two stirs, the double game, time remedies everything, tries to live ”, said Piero Calamandrei. “It's better to live than to kick the bucket”, the “totus politicus” Giulio Andreotti ideally replied to the illustrious jurist. Both, albeit with opposite intentions, had acutely grasped one of the distinctive features of our national character. On the other hand, it was a disenchanted conservative like Giuseppe Prezzolini, founder of the Congregation of Apoti (that is, of "those who don't drink them"), who argued that among us there are neither ancestors nor posterity: there are only contemporaries. A self-absolute "contemporaneism", a sort of liberation of the responsibilities held towards past generations and the responsibilities one should have towards future generations.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/siamo-un-paese-orlo-della-poverta/ on Sat, 03 Jun 2023 04:33:49 +0000.